The Summer of '53

By Diane Johnson;

Published: September 17, 1995

MANHATTAN, WHEN I WAS YOUNG By Mary Cantwell. 214 pp. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.

THE impulse to write a memoir usually fits into one or more of three categories: revenge, witness or self-justification -- one might think of such examples as Joan Crawford's daughter in "Mommie Dearest," Winston Churchill and Albert Speer. Mary Cantwell's charming memoir, "Manhattan, When I Was Young," fits into the latter two categories, but equivocally, as if she is not quite sure which impulse has the upper hand. She is a superb witness to the life of young professionals in New York, beginning in 1953, when she arrives after college to take a job at Mademoiselle magazine. As a work of self-justification, her book strikes a curious note of ambivalence.

From the point of view of the reader of memoirs, it's hard to say whether it is more amusing to read about events you know nothing of or those in which you had a little role, affording you the pleasure of detecting errors and increasing your own understanding. That might have been me, you say, or I remember that song, or yes, that's what we were wearing that summer. The smallest of connections is interesting, once you get over the shock that your approximate contemporaries are writing their memoirs.

This reader, then a country-mouse teen-ager terrified by New York, might well have encountered Mary Cantwell (but didn't) in the editorial offices of Mademoiselle, where I was leaving a stint as a guest editor just as Ms. Cantwell was arriving, enamored of New York, to pursue a career at that magazine. That was the time and place Sylvia Plath made famous in "The Bell Jar," a tough, female-run world of redoubtable characters like Leo Lerman, Cyrilly Abels and the editor in chief, Betsy Talbot Blackwell, or B. T. B., who wore her hat at her desk.

During her career at Mademoiselle and also Vogue (she is now an editorial writer for The New York Times), she is witness to many of the magazine world's famous personages. She marries a literary young man, has two babies, keeps house, continues to work, has health and marital problems, is divorced. Memory, she says, is in her case not selective: "I recall completely or I am afflicted with amnesia. There is no in-between." Readers of a certain age will relish her precise descriptions of those brick-and-board bookcases, shag rugs, Danish stainless steel cutlery and red Russel Wright dishes of the 50's, to be replaced, when the couples move up in the world, by "a real desk. . . . A real mahogany table and four real Hitchcock chairs from the same place were between the windows. We had a few prints, by French artists. . . . We were beginning to acquire style."

They will travel, eat snails, gain a knowledge of wine and a television set. In their next place, "the little foreign matchbooks came from West Fourth Street and were very Village. The Chinese export porcelain cups, each of which had at least one hairline crack and held cigarettes, were very New England, as was the white ironstone pitcher. . . . The Spode dinner service spoke of a trip or two to London, the copper pots in the kitchen of a trip or two to Paris, and the reproduction 18th-century silverplate of an inability to afford sterling combined with a rejection of stainless steel modernism. The two wine racks in the coat closet told of someone venturing beyond Soave and Chianti, and the copies of 'Tropic of Cancer,' 'Tropic of Capricorn' and 'Les Amours Jaunes' argued junior year abroad."

On decor, she is an excellent cultural historian, with a fashion editor's perfect memory for brand names, recipes, trends. On the subject of her failed marriage, she is equally clear, but only up to a point. She reports her own frigidity in poignant detail: "The woman is lonely, she is always lonely, and she would like to ask her husband if she could sit in his lap. He would like that. But if she does, she will feel his penis rise and push against her buttocks, and that will shock and sicken her. . . . So she is silent and motionless and he is silent and motionless, and the one keeps her head bent over Ngaio Marsh and the other keeps his head bent over Philip Rahv."

When her husband says, "Lock Mary Lee into an igloo with Mastroianni for two years . . . and nothing would happen," she thinks he is boasting.

Eventually the husband philanders, she consults psychiatrists and priests, they divorce. The reasons are clear enough to the reader. She presents herself candidly as a person who did not understand her problems at the time, and she gracefully avoids putting too much blame on the extremely patient husband. Nor does she blame the other villains -- inept doctors and psychiatrists, the Roman Catholic Church and her adored departed Daddy. Revenge is not on her mind, yet she's not beating herself up either. Hers is the hesitant, angry but somehow defensive tone of a woman who would like some reassurance and would like in some measure to alter the past, but who cannot yet admit that she has not been right.

WHEN a priest apologizes to her for "what the Catholic Church, his church, had done to me," she rejects his lenient modern view, regretting that "he did not give me four Our Fathers, three Hail Marys and some rules to live by." She seems more comfortable with her failures, painful as they are, than with the idea of changing, yet without change her problems would remain fundamentally insoluble.

So instead of the cheering epiphanies with which many memoirists conclude, Ms. Cantwell can provide only the disquieting example of someone for whom life has not provided answers, if it does for anyone. Recalling her first pregnancy makes her sad, because it is a cruelty to have known perfect happiness. "I am once again that young woman with the big belly and my Kate is once again sleeping peacefully in the amniotic sac, and my heart breaks for both of us," she writes, as if life were so disappointing she wouldn't wish it on a loved child. The reader is left to wish Mary Cantwell could be liberated from the curious prison of her unhappiness but without much hope that that will happen.

Diane Johnson, a novelist and critic, is finishing a novel about Americans in Paris.